Ecus (was: Pater Noster (purely linguistically)

On Friday, December 3, 2004, at 01:58 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
>> It seems that |quo| and |co| were both pronounced the same [k_wo] by most
>> (all?) speakers, and there are other examples of confusion in spelling.
>
> Reminds me - I saw a piece on Latin inflection somewhere that claimed
> that forms
> like _equus_, _equi_ were late regularizations for classical _ecus_,
> _equi_. Any
> comment on this?
As far as i know, the regularization was Classical. It is true _equus_ and
_ecus_ would as far as we can tell both be pronounced ['Ek_wUs] and in
early inscriptions we do find things like _ecus_ with plural _equi_ but I
am fairly certain that the practice of regularizing the written stem as
equ- dates back to the Classical period, at least to the time of Augustus
if not a little earlier.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]